Con Academy by Joe Schreiber

his expression unreadable. “That’s a whole lot of risk to take just because somebody’s a bully and a creep.”
    â€œYeah, well,” I say, and now it’s time to sell it. “He dated my mom for a while and got rough with her. Knocked her around a time or two. The last time, he broke her jaw.” I narrow my eyes. “That’s when I decided to go to work for him.”
    â€œTaking matters into your own hands, huh?”
    â€œLet’s just say it’s personal with me.”
    â€œYou’re breaking my heart.” Brandt snorts and rolls his eyes. “You think I want to hear your life story?” he asks, but I can tell that something in his face has relaxed, and even though he doesn’t know it himself, I can tell that he’s beginning to trust me.
    Which is how I know I’ve hooked him.

Twelve
    â€œW HAT HAPPENED TO YOUR FACE? ” D AD ASKS.
    It’s Sunday morning, and I’m sitting on a lumpy mattress in the two-hundred-dollar-a-week room that he’s got at the Motel 6 in town, twelve miles from Connaughton, while he finishes shaving. The bathroom door is open just wide enough that I can see his half-lathered face in the mirror, his eyes reflected back on me, our conversation punctuated by the occasional
clink-clink-clink
as he taps the whiskers from the razor into the bathroom sink. The room smells like stale bourbon, dirty laundry, and somebody else’s cheap perfume. Put them all together and you’ve got a scratch-and-sniff Father’s Day card that basically comprises my entire childhood.
    â€œMind if I open a window?”
    â€œAre you kidding?” He steps out of the bathroom, toweling off. “It’s twenty degrees out there.”
    â€œYeah, well, I can barely breathe in here.”
    â€œDon’t change the subject.” Crossing the room, he picks up the Cumberland Farms coffee that I brought him, peels off the plastic lid, and takes a big gulp. “I thought you were living large over at that fancy school of yours. But you don’t return any of my phone calls all week, and now all of a sudden you show up looking like somebody’s been using your face for a catcher’s mitt. What gives?”
    I take a deep breath. The next four words are going to be painful, but there’s no sense in delaying the inevitable. “I need your help.”
    He grins. “At last, the boy sees reason. What’s the play?”
    â€œI want to run the online poker con.”
    â€œThe online . . .” Dad stops smiling. He puts the coffee down, and his freshly shaved face now looks pale and hung-over. “That’s suicide, kid. You trying to get clipped?”
    â€œYou haven’t even heard my angle yet.”
    He shakes his head. “Don’t need to.”
    â€œIt’s a solid grift.”
    â€œI know it’s a solid grift, boy. I invented it.”
    He’s wrong, but right now I don’t see any reason to argue the point. The online poker swindle is a modern-day twist on the prehistoric wire con that guys like us have been running since the invention of money.
    Here’s how it works: You tell the mark about your boss, some shady character who runs an online gambling business out of a rundown office space. The specific type of gambling doesn’t really matter—it can be poker, blackjack, the ponies, whatever. You bring the mark by, in person, to see how the whole thing works and then tell him you’ve figured out a way to beat the system—all you need is a guy on the outside to place the bets. Naturally the mark is going to be suspicious of this, so you prove your trustworthiness by fronting him the money and letting him win a few small bets—a thousand here, a thousand there. Once he starts winning, the small potatoes don’t satisfy him anymore and he slaps down a huge bet with his own cash, a big enough buy-in that winning is going to bring the whole